Stick Horse Cowgirls

If you’ve followed this blog for long, you will know that my husband of (then) thirty-six years left me and our entire family for a twenty-nine-year old.  You know, too, that it was a shock that this seemingly-perfect husband, elder of church, fine-upstanding-citizen would do such a thing. It was not only a shock to our family but to all who knew us….seemingly for a while…but now it appears not so much. Please indulge me with generalities here…I know there are exceptions to any generalizing. I have heard of the “bro [brother[ code.”  What I have read in my attempts to understand the adultery dynamic is this: Men do not generally squeal on one another in the area of marital infidelity.  Men who are close to their wives—who confide everything else—generally will not tell wives if a male friend is cheating because we women do tell as a rule.  Telling her would violate the Bro-Code. The literature (yes, real literature from social scientists) tells us that your...

My last post about domestic violence was a report—passing on information I learned in a recent class and some of my observations from my law practice.  But in the course of discussing that post with V, she jolted me into a realization that this subject had touched my life and is, perhaps, touching it still. As most of you know, V and I have been friends for 57 years (oh, Lordy!), and we lived right next door to each other as children.  I moved away when I was about 8, although our parents had the great, good foresight to be certain we saw each other frequently (this friendship has been a life-saver for me in these later years).  As some of you also know, I grew up with a brilliant but alcoholic and womanizing lawyer father.  I loved him very much and miss him even now, but he was a mess, and he brought that mess down on his wife and children.  He would often come home very late at night, reeking of alcohol, women would call our home…you get the picture....

If you’ve followed this blog long, you know that I cannot help but offer social commentary. I’ve spent the last two days in continuing education.  One of our speakers was on domestic violence.  I am somewhat an expert from decades of helping women escape and trying to convince them that they should escape.  It is such a problem in our society that I think it is helpful to review the statistics.  They shock even me.  Just look at these statistics for the US: According to the U.S. Surgeon General, domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women in the United States. 95% of the victims of domestic violence are women. 35% of all emergency room calls are a result of domestic violence.  It is the largest single reason for ER visits by women. Of those who abuse their partner, well over 65% also physically and/or sexually abuse the children. EVERY day .....4 women and 3 children in the US die as a result ...

One of the perks of being a blogger is having an outlet to vent about one’s pet peeves in hopes there is an audience.  Better than screaming to yourself.  Combine that with a day on the lawn tractor, which leads to even more over-thinking than usual, and you have a full blown rant on your hands. The other day a friend, speaking of the father of her child, said, “ Jo-Jo just does not change dirty diapers.  He doesn’t like wet ones, either, but he absolutely refuses to change the dirty ones.  It makes him retch ”  Oh, my.  This kind of thing just sends me into orbit, for it is a sign of something deeper—an infantile man.  And a bully.  Let me explain. Jo-Jo happens to be a great outdoorsman.  He would stand over a deer he had just shot and watch the last lights of life ebb away.  He would then string up the still-warm body, slit it open, allowing the guts to spill out, and lasciviously grin at his triumph. But he claims to have to...

Yet again, blame this post on V.   She has assured me that since this has been on TV, we’ll retain our PG-13 rating. Have you seen this ad? It only confirms what I have learned in my fifth decade of life: Most everything revolves around sex. You think I’m wrong?  Nope, I’m not.  I’ve practiced family law 32 years ( shudder ) and I know this to be true.  Now.  A bit late in the day.  I would have denied this ten years ago. We women have got to get it through our heads: Men just are not as relational as women are.  They have a pull to sex  from a perspective that we don’t have.  This is not to say that we don’t like sex, too; only it is different for them and not nearly as relationship-based as we women assume.  And it pulls in a way that can lead (often) one away from family and fealty. Notice in the video—it’s the men scrapping for it. The last issue of Discover magazine has a whole article on this.  Just look at these qu...

When my son was a child and my husband was out of town, one of our favorite things to do was to sit in the bed together early and watch what he called “nature flicks.”  We enjoyed the Trials of Life series, National Geographic animal specials and all things such as might be found these days on Animal Planet.  I love seeing into the social habits and ways of animals.  Often I see parallels to our own lives or hints at how we humans might could manage a little better than we do if only we’d take cues from our non-human brethren.  I thought about this aspect of nature study the other day when I saw a documentary on elephants. In one scene a zoo elephant was being prepared for the delivery of her first calf.  This was one tame elephant—they are so huge that they’d better be tamed.  Her keepers were loving and attentive.  They had trained her to submit to restraints, fearing that her domestic life away from the herd  setting that nature had inte...

I had lunch with a fellow attorney this week.  As we chatted, we slipped into sharing skeletons from our own families’ closets.  We had agreed, being family lawyers, that there are no “normal families.”  We all have closet skeletons, don’t we? I have no problem sharing my family’s skeletons—I can talk ad nauseum about my own marital travails.   I’ve written before about my father, an alcoholic womanizer who is now gone.  Lest you believe I am idly speaking  ill of the dead, let me just say this:  I loved my father—love and miss him still—but things are what they are.  There’s not a soul who knew him who would deny the characterization I have just given him.   Even he, who would deny the alcoholism (I guess he just chose to get slobbering, pants-wetting drunk) would admit, proudly, of the womanizing. My friend was a bit more reticent, but here’s the story that came out. There are five siblings, of which she is the least....

Susan and John.  They had a charmed life; both had deep trust funds from old money.  They had grown up in the same country club, had fallen in love and married seventeen years earlier.  Susan had a career as owner of a retail store.  She didn’t have to work and started this out of her passion, but still she made money.  She was a smart girl.  John had a successful career as an executive in a large locally-based company. They had two sons, in the third and fifth grades.  John was on the private school board.  Susan was as involved as any mother could be in school and sporting activities. John decided he wasn’t happy.  He came to see me to get out of the marriage.  He didn’t blame Susan.  He said, in fact, that she was a great person, a great mother, and did her best at all.  He just wanted out.  He confessed that the fault was his.  He had been through an affair and, while that woman was not someone he would leave his...

Some time back in one of my family-science journals I saw an article on “community.”  The gist of the article was that we have, basically, lost community through “busyness of life” and through mobility.  One thing the article said that gave me thought was that air conditioning was one problem, compounded by television, and lack of porches and sidewalks another.  Oh, they did not pin the biggest blame on these elements, but I certainly sat up and paid attention that they were mentioned. According to the authors, there was a day in America when the routine was to come in, have supper, clean up, and go sit on the porch for a while if the weather was good.  If you were in the city, you went out to sit on the stoop.  Some folks might stroll the sidewalks, visiting with those sitting on their porches as they went. Some might  even join their neighbors for a “sit a spell” chat, and everyone could see up and down the street as to what the kids were doing. I...

Yesterday I told V a work story that made her remember one of our favorite movies: The Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio .  But first, here’s my story: My client was sad, alrigh t, but the most accurate description I can think of is “exhausted.”  She was exhausted as in the really tired sense, but she was  also exhausted in that she had pulled out the stops to save her marriage—exhausted all avenues, as it were.  It was not to be, despite her best efforts. Her problem with her professional, graduate-school-educated husband was prescription drugs.  He was hooked, had been to rehab twice and had, unbeknownst to client, drained their entire financial reserves, which were at one time substantial—all gone now.  Husband was now unemployed and just coming out of rehab for the second time (not cheap) thanks to his parents. Both sides of the family gave her emotional support as she made the hard  decision to divorce.  They were about to lose the house an...